I use my Suica card every working day in part of my commute between Yokohama and Tokyo.
Once a month I renew my travel pass by placing the card in the machine in the station. The touch screen UI is quite sophisticated allowing you decide when the pass will start and giving you the choice of whether you need a reciept or not so that you can claim the cost on your expenses.
The best feature is that you can also "charge" the card with money and use it as a travel card outside of your normal route. i.e. If you pass for the journey between B to C and one day have to take the train from A to D i.e A-B-C-D it will deduct the charge for the A-B and C-D sections and not charge you for B-C which is covered by your pass.
Every station has notebook PC in the office where the station staff can take the card and look at it if there was a problem. During the first week of introduction there were a few glitches and the stationmaster reset the "bad" count on my card after my card prevented me from getting out of the station thinking that I had jumped the gate at the previous station.
Recently while playing with the machine in the station I found that it can give you a printout of your last 50 journies which could cause privacy concerns for some people.
Right now on Joi Ito's Chronology of Moblogging I am listed as the first person to post to their blog (in my case Livejournal) from their email enabled phone on January 4, 2001 at 4:16pm. I wrote a Python script over that New Year holiday that I hooked up to Qmail and used Livejournal's HTTP API to post the message. I'm sure that I wasn't the first person to do it as many people were discussing this around that time but I may possibly have been since at that time email enabled phones were not common outside Japan, where I live.
I'd love to hear from anyone who can show that they posted from their phone using email before then so we can set history straight.
On February 5th I added to graphic to help me remember that these were posted from the phone.
I live in Tokyo and I tuned into the NHK (National TV) satellite channel this morning to watch the BBC and ABC coverage of the accident. Between 8am and 10am they usually show news programs from the UK, US, Russia, Germany, Hong Kong, Phillipines etc in their native languages. Guess what was on instead? The Mets vs Braves baseball game!
Now this is quite normal for NHK to replace the news with sport but news is lifeline for non-native Japanese speakers and I expect that all of the stations above covered the incident.
I quickly logged on and watched the BBC coverage from their webpage and as of yet I have not seen that picture of the hole in the roof on the Japanese news coverage. Plenty of pictures of people waiting at the train station to see whether their train through the area has been cancelled.
As I write the weather report is on and it looks like the wind is blowing our way... and I am going shopping for a real sattelite TV tuner. Bye bye NHK..
Slashdot Mirror
I use my Suica card every working day in part of my commute between Yokohama and Tokyo.
Once a month I renew my travel pass by placing the card in the machine in the station. The touch screen UI is quite sophisticated allowing you decide when the pass will start and giving you the choice of whether you need a reciept or not so that you can claim the cost on your expenses.
The best feature is that you can also "charge" the card with money and use it as a travel card outside of your normal route. i.e. If you pass for the journey between B to C and one day have to take the train from A to D i.e A-B-C-D it will deduct the charge for the A-B and C-D sections and not charge you for B-C which is covered by your pass.
Every station has notebook PC in the office where the station staff can take the card and look at it if there was a problem. During the first week of introduction there were a few glitches and the stationmaster reset the "bad" count on my card after my card prevented me from getting out of the station thinking that I had jumped the gate at the previous station.
Recently while playing with the machine in the station I found that it can give you a printout of your last 50 journies which could cause privacy concerns for some people.
I'd love to hear from anyone who can show that they posted from their phone using email before then so we can set history straight.
On February 5th I added to graphic to help me remember that these were posted from the phone.
Now this is quite normal for NHK to replace the news with sport but news is lifeline for non-native Japanese speakers and I expect that all of the stations above covered the incident.
I quickly logged on and watched the BBC coverage from their webpage and as of yet I have not seen that picture of the hole in the roof on the Japanese news coverage. Plenty of pictures of people waiting at the train station to see whether their train through the area has been cancelled.
As I write the weather report is on and it looks like the wind is blowing our way... and I am going shopping for a real sattelite TV tuner. Bye bye NHK..